“You know nothing about me, about my family, about anything,” he said now, leaning over the table so that he was inches from Gerrity’s face. He knew he should shut up. This wasn’t going to help Cara, or make it easier for himself. But he couldn’t stop. He had no gun, no knife, not even a stick. But he had horror in bucket loads and if Gerrity thought he was the only one dishing it out, he was going to show him how wrong he was.
“You think you can scare me? I’ve seen things that would make you cry, yeah even you. You sit here, big man in your little pub, running what you think of as your empire. But you’re just a blip, you mean nothing in the end. You’re petty and small and that’s why you’re taking it out on the weakest. You didn’t have the balls to take me, did you? You took Cara, she’s just a teenager. I know your type and in the end, you’re just a low-life. You have one over on me now but you mark my words, you’ll regret keeping me around. I’m not scared for me. Every day is a bonus already and if I told you the half of what I’ve seen, you’d never sleep again. You’re just a thug. Same as the thugs minding your car, selling your gear on the street. Same as me, Gerrity. It’s just a matter of luck that you’re sat there. You might think you rule the world but the world is bigger than your little corner.”
Through this tirade, Gerrity stared straight into Theo’s eyes. Theo had to hand it to him: he wasn’t easily intimidated.
“Oh, I know the part luck has played in my life, Theo,” he said. “Probably not as big a part as in yours but still. I grew up poor, laughed at by the other lads for my broken shoes and my hand-me-down clothes, not even kids’ clothes, mind, I was wearing grown-ups’ clothes, rolled-up trousers, t-shirts five sizes too big. I made myself. I didn’t have a saviour to come and get me out.”
“You’re breaking my heart,” Theo muttered.
“Oh I’m sure you had it worse. Mud hut, was it? Barefoot walking miles to school? Yeah, we’ve all seen the pictures. We’ve all sung the Live Aid songs. But you’re in my city now, boyo, and you’ll abide by my rules. You wanted to be part of this place. Well, you are now. There’s always a price to pay for the life we want. You wanted money, or prestige, or to be one of us, right? Well, I’m the piper and you have to pay, just like every other dreamer.”
Gerrity was right. Theo might not have knocked at this door but he’d still walked through it when it squeaked open before him. He’d no one to blame but himself. It wasn’t money or prestige though, and not even because he thought it would help him fit in. He wasn’t that dumb. I just didn’t not do it, Theo thought. That’s all it was.
“So, d’you get the picture now?”
Gerrity drained his pint. Thirsty work being a sanctimonious son-of-a-bitch, thought Theo. He nodded.
“But only if Cara is okay, if you haven’t hurt her. I want to see her now, or I swear to God…”
Gerrity burst out laughing then, shoulders shaking, hands on his knees, rocking back and forth.
“I can’t do that,” he managed to sputter.
Theo jumped up, leaning over the table, his hands reaching for Gerrity’s throat. He heard fast, heavy footfalls behind him. He didn’t even turn around. It didn’t matter. He would kill him if Cara…
“Hold your horses. Sit the fuck back down.”
Gerrity had stopped laughing now. He looked over Theo’s shoulder, raised a finger and the footsteps moved away again.
“I can’t do it because she’s not here. She never was.”
Theo sank into the chair. What was going on? He’d called her, she didn’t answer.
“See the thing you don’t realise, Theo, is that I control everything already.”
It was Gerrity leaning over the table now so that his face filled Theo’s world. He could smell the beer off his breath.
“Even what’s in your head. I can make your reality. I can get inside your brain and move all the bits around.”
He laughed again.
“That’s what real power is, Theo. That’s what you need to understand.”
Theo knew he’d had enough words from Gerrity to make sense of the situation. They just all seemed muddled, they wouldn’t get in line.
“What d’you mean? She was never here?”
“Of course not. We’re not savages,” Gerrity said and Theo winced at the emphasis on the last word. “I just needed you to understand what you had to do. You see, you might think my power resides in my money, or my guns, or the guys around me. But that’d be wrong. I told you before. It’s fear. That’s the most lethal weapon I have. The Gardaí are scared of me, the politicians are scared of me, my guys are scared of me, and now you’re scared of me. And I didn’t even have to do anything.”
He sniggered, and for the space of a heartbeat, Theo glimpsed the boy with the too-big clothes and the chip on his shoulder.
He stood up abruptly. He wasn’t going to listen to any more of this.
“You have no idea what’s inside my head, Gerrity. And from me to you, I wouldn’t fuck with that stuff. You never know what might happen. You think I got into this to make some kind of gain? You’re wrong. I got into this because I had nothing to lose. That’s a subtle difference that should bother you.”
“Michael will call you to set up a meeting. Be ready,” Gerrity shouted after him as he stormed out the door, bursting into the afternoon sunshine.
Theo legged it down the road, fury driving him forward, but when he got to the corner, he had to stop and sit on a low wall outside one of the identikit houses with their big cars and trimmed lawns. He pulled out his fags. His hands were shaking. Gerrity was the puppet-master, pulling strings all over the city, dragging him to Sandymount, making sure Cara didn’t have her phone, creating horror out of nothing. This time. Because who was to say he wouldn’t take Cara next time? Any day of any week, he could pick up Theo’s life and smash it to pieces like a plastic toy. Just like the men with a single purpose had done when he was seven.
It’s like I never learned anything, he thought, and the voice he heard was a little voice, speaking in another language. He looked up and down the road – closed doors, a man in a flower-framed garden raking the leaves that had fallen from the oak trees lining the street, a boy on a bike doing wheelies for himself, a woman dusting a windowsill upstairs.
He’d been had alright. He’d thought all this difference – the clothes, the houses, the cars, the stuff, stuff, stuff – meant everything was different in Dublin. I didn’t cop that it means nothing, that life is still disposable here, he thought. That all this is no guarantee that you can control anything. I learned that over there only too well but it isn’t supposed to be like this in rich places, is it? I thought a person, an actual body, was something here. I thought it could only be broken, smashed, ripped apart over there. But they can rip you to shreds, body and soul, here too. He saw a curtain twitching in the house across the road. A white-haired lady’s face appeared. She was frowning. Time to go.
He went straight to Cara’s house, boarding buses automatically, sitting in a daze, registering nothing around him until he was standing at her door and realising he was drenched because it was raining, and it felt like it always had been. Ronan pulled open the door. His eyes widened when he saw Theo.
“Surprised, you prick? Let me in,” Theo said, pushing past him.
“Cara, Cara!” he shouted up the stairs.
Cara’s mother came out from the kitchen.
“What’s going on?” she said. “You’re Theo, aren’t ye? What d’ye want with Cara?”
“I just need to see her. It’s… I need to see her right now. Is she here?”
He addressed this to Ronan, who was still standing by the door, as if he didn’t know whether to shut it or run out.
“Where’s your phone, Ronan?” Theo asked.
“What? What d’ye mean?”
“Just tell me. Where is it?”
“Here. Only I must’ve forgotten to charge it. It’s dead,” Ronan said, pulling it out of his pocket. He had the sense to look guil
ty, at least.
“D’you have Cara’s phone as well? Just tell me,” Theo said.
Ronan looked like he might start to cry but he managed a nod.
“Gerrity tell you to take it?”
Another nod.
Theo was aware of the mother still standing at the door to the kitchen. He didn’t know how much she knew about what Ronan was up to and he didn’t care if he’d dropped him in it. Maybe she could pull her son out. None of his business. He’d enough problems.
“Theo, what are ye doing here?”
Cara was at the top of the stairs, hair loose around her face. Even standing above him, she looked as though this box of a house was making her smaller. Like Alice in Wonderland, her head should be sticking out of the window, arms out of the doors. She was too… everything for this place.
“C’mon, we’re going. I need to talk to you,” he said, already turning around and heading for the door.
“Now, just wait a minute.” It was the mother. I don’t have the time or the energy for this, Theo thought, but it wasn’t her fault. She was just doing what good mothers do.
“Where d’ye think you’re going with my daughter? What do you want from her?”
“I just want to have a chat. Cara and me… we’re good friends, we’ve been working together at The Deep and I just need to have a word with her. It’s nothing to worry about, honest.”
Theo kept his voice soft, reasonable. There had been too much shouting today. He walked back to her, looked her straight in the eye, and said: “I just want to talk to her.”
He couldn’t tell if he’d scared her or reassured her but she looked up at Cara, still on the stairs, and slowly nodded. For a split second, he saw the scene through her eyes. He saw himself, looming over her, face wet with rain, coat dripping on her old brown carpet, and behind him Ronan still holding the door. His brain was pounding with the guilt of everything that had brought him here. He was the tip of Gerrity’s spear, pushing into this hallway. He had to go.
“Give her her phone,” he shot at Ronan as he walked past.
Ronan pulled the phone out of the back pocket of his baggy jeans and gave it to Cara. She looked at it like she’d never seen it before. She started to say something but Theo grabbed her arm.
When they were out on the road, he filled her in. She was quiet for a while but just hearing her breathe, hearing her footsteps beside him, was enough for now.
“So you’re gonna start selling again? But ye said ye’d get out, Theo?”
“And I will,” he said. “But I have to do this now. I don’t have a choice. That’s the point, that’s the hook he has me on. What else can I do?”
He looked down at her. Her face was dripping, her hair hanging like a beaded curtain around it. She might be crying but he couldn’t tell. She put her hand in his and they walked on. The sky was low over their heads and the rain was soft but it was the kind of rain that made you think you’d never see the sun again.
“Where are we going?” Her voice was muffled.
“I dunno,” he said. “We could go to Cath’s for a while? She said she was going out this evening. I’ll make you something to eat and then I can bring you home later, if you want. You know, I’m a superhero in the kitchen too.”
But she didn’t laugh this time. Gerrity had stolen her laugh and Theo felt his free hand balling into a fist at the thought. He didn’t want to bring Cara back to her home tonight. He didn’t want to let go of her hand or lose the warmth of her by his side. If she was what Gerrity had over him, she was also the only thing stopping him from toppling over, from crashing and burning. Call it love, or hope, or maybe pure need right now but he knew this girl was his salvation. She is real and this is real and Gerrity can’t change it. He’s not in my head, he can’t be in my head. We’ll figure this out and there will be a place for us afterwards. I’ve died before, my world has died before, and I’ll be damned if it’ll happen a second time, he thought.
It felt like night already with the low clouds pushing the tepid light out of the sky. The world was dripping and whispering. Car tyres hissing, footsteps sucking the slick paths, rain sliding softly down his face.
“We’ll figure this out, Cara. I promise. This is not it, not the way it will be. I just need some time and then we’ll start all over again.”
“Ye can’t blow everything up and then rebuild it, Theo. It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “You’re dreamin’ if ye think there’s a way out. If there was, we’d all be taking it. We’d all be rebuilding ourselves, our lives. Making them what we want them to be. Sometimes ye just have what ye have and ye just have to get on with it.”
He turned to her, took her face between his big hands.
“You’re wrong, Cara. I’ve done it before. I’ve been dead and now I’m alive. Really alive now, with you, for the first time. We can build our own world, together, this time for us. All of this,” and he took his hands from her cold, wet cheeks, and threw them out, taking in the street, the rain, the cars, the grey and grey and grey, “all of this is just one version of what can be. It’s not real. Sorry, I’m not saying it right.”
He took a breath. He needed his best words.
“It’s not the most important thing. It’s just geography. A place. Places change. We are more than just the place around us. This is not us. We’re more than what we are here.”
And there it was, just a tiny flicker around her lips and then her smile. He felt like the champion of the world. He, Theo, had brought that smile back. Okay, so he might have to go back to dealing for a while. He might have to flatter that git, make Gerrity think he was the boss again. But inside, he, Theo, would know he was Cara’s smile-maker. Gerrity’s just a breaker. I’m a maker. I make smiles and I can remake my world too.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In a flickering room in Clontarf, Theo and Cara sat together on a leather sofa, a brilliant red Kenyan shuka weaving their legs together so that in the half-light of the television, they looked like a double-bodied sea nymph rising from a coral-coloured ocean. They talked softly, laughing at half-jokes and half-sentences, kissing, taking time to discover the everything that was their togetherness as shadows rippled across a map of East Africa on the wall.
In Merrickstown, Deirdre had just washed up after dinner. She wiped the wooden counters in the over-bright kitchen, flinging stray spoons and forks into the sink. Conor and Kevin were upstairs, Fergal was out, and she was going to watch a film with her girl. Everything was perfect in this moment, she thought. Sometimes, the smallest things could be enough to fill you with an intense feeling of joy. It must be something to do with routine and place and maybe that little bit of fatigue at the end of the day that slowed you down just enough to feel the good. She put the cloth on the side, went to the fridge, took out the bottle of white wine and poured herself a large glass. It would relax her, and later, when she started to worry about when and how he would come in, it would hopefully knock her out before all that became a problem. In the sitting room, Grace was already slotting the DVD into the machine.
“C’mon Mam, leave the kitchen. It’ll be the same tomorrow,” she yelled.
Deirdre poured her a glass too and carried them both through. Grace budged up to make room for her on the sofa. Her phone was in her hand. Still waiting for news from London then, Deirdre thought. She held out the wine, sat down and snuggled up to Grace, making her daughter laugh and fake push her away.
Conor poked his head around the door.
“What ye gonna watch?” he asked.
He was trying so hard to seem like he didn’t care that Deirdre had to stop herself from jumping up, folding him in her arms and tickling the boy out of the man. But it was too late for that now. He had to be the man-boy he thought worked. There was no other way.
“He’s Just Not That Into You,” Grace said, without looking up.
“Fuck’s sake,” said Conor, shaking his head.
“Nobody asked your opinion. Why don’t ye go back up to y
our cave and play your little boy computer games,” Grace shot back.
Conor held up his middle finger, and then, hesitating just a heartbeat too long for Deirdre not to notice, he left and thumped up the stairs.
“When did you two stop being friends?” Deirdre asked.
Grace grimaced and rolled her eyes.
“No, I mean it, love. When was it? You used to be great pals, you had such laughs together when you were eight and he was five. He worshipped you. You were his hero,” she said.
“Ah Mam, get over it. And by the way, no one says ‘pals’ any more. He’s been a moody brat for years now. Can’t be doing with his sulking and face-pulling. Let’s start the film or you’ll be asleep before the end as usual.”
She grinned at her mam, they clinked glasses and Grace pressed play.
“Anyway, we’ll probably be friends again someday. Don’t worry bout it. It’s all normal.”
Several miles to the north, a man in a black donkey jacket was striding along the canal on legs that seemed too short for his broad torso.
“Harvey! Harvey, c’mon here now,” he called to the Labrador criss-crossing the path ahead of him like a furry ping-pong ball, dragging all the light of the dying sun into its honey-coloured coat. Harvey stopped suddenly, barking out at the water, and the man nearly tripped over him.
“Jaysus, Harvey! What ye looking at, boy?”
The man edged closer to the water, bending to soothe the agitated dog. The light was fading but there was just enough to see that the shape in the middle of the canal was a man, face down, hands by his side, gliding slowly out of the city. The stocky man pulled his phone from his pocket with shaking hands. But just before he dialled the police, he paused to make sure and to pay his silent respects. Even the dog quietened and, for a moment, they both stood silently watching the faceless body slide across its own Styx as the sun gave up its hold on the edge of the world and slipped below.
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